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Friday Fun: Old (pirate) Movies January 2, 2015

Over the holiday break, we were on a bit of a pirate kick.  We watched the first three Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC) movies.  On New Year’s Eve, we were trying to pick out another movie and I found an old VHS tape of Cutthroat Island, one of my favorite movies from my teen years.  Despite having the tape, I can’t honestly remember the last time I watched it.

Apparently, this is one of those movies that had really poor advertising when it came out.  People either have never heard of it or saw it and loved it.  I’d heard of it because I was on a big Geena Davis kick at the time.  Who didn’t want to grow up to be like Geena Davis twenty years ago?

It was a lot of fun after watching PotC.  It was very obviously made before widespread use of CGI, which led to a lot of interesting cinematography.  First, the ships were beautiful and incredible, and there were lots of gorgeous scenes of sweeping around the ships from the air…something that you didn’t see a lot of in PotC.  Second, there were lots of real explosions, and the stunts were obviously done by stunt doubles.  With the exception of one scene where Matthew Modine was running away from an explosion and was conked on the head unexpectedly, there are a lot of scenes where they obviously pan back from the actors (especially Geena Davis) and you just somehow can tell it’s a double.  And then there’s the whole thing you start to realize watching pre-CGI movies: CGI makes everything so clean and polished…and this movie wasn’t…which made it seem more real.

The thing I loved most about it, though, had nothing to do with CGI:  it was that Geena Davis’ character never needs rescuing…and was often the rescuer.

Obviously it’s not a ‘classic’ pirate movie nor did it have the polish of a Disney-fied film, but it was a lot of fun.  And it was a bit of time travel – backwards to the age of pirates but also backwards to the pre-CGI era.  It makes me want to pull out some other “old” movies to share with the kids.  What are some of your favorite “old” movies?